In April, we asked you how you experience the current situation in your organisations. Not superficially, not diplomatically - but honestly. 16 teams from the civil society sector responded. We asked six questions: about stress in the team, psychological safety, the financial situation, personnel, networks - and an open question at the end [...]

In January, I was alone on the Atlantic coast in Portugal. No programme and no agenda. And at some point, a song by AnnenMayKantereit came to mind: „Three days by the sea and I know who I am again." I knew at that moment: that's exactly it. The sea brings me back to myself. And somehow [...]

Dear readers, we live in an age in which sentences are created in milliseconds. Algorithms calculate the probability of the next word, fill in blank pages and give us an impression of perfection that we often barely achieve ourselves. We at SOCIUS also work with artificial intelligence on a daily basis - as a tool, as a sparring partner, as an echo. But while we use the [...]

It was a Monday evening and I was nervous. In front of me: the screen with the zoom tiles slowly filling up with the faces of my peer group, and a script I had written myself - because English is not my first language and I wanted to make sure I wasn't forgetting anything important. I was about to go to the first [...]

Dear readers, behind us all lies a year that has demanded a lot from us. We have juggled between crisis mode and the urge to create, we have held structures and probably all experienced moments in which hope briefly held its breath. We longed for feedback and didn't always get it the way we wanted it, too many [...]

For the new year, we wish ourselves and you a stable civil society. Courage to face contact and conflict Courage to face truths and bouts of courage. Plurality, mindfulness and resonance. Peace of mind and a piece of cake. I asked my colleagues what this means to them. Here are their answers: Julia - What act of courage would you like to provoke - [...]

How it all began It all started with the realisation that non-profit organisations need their own specific type of "management consultancy". With this idea in mind, Rudi Piwko founded SOCIUS as a non-profit limited company in 1998 with the support of its legendary inventor, Prof. Artur Fischer. Concrete needs such as fundraising and public relations work were at the centre of this initial period. With the help of the Theodor Heuss [...]

In preparation for the oe-tag 2025 on 13 June 2025 in Halle (Saale), where we want to embark on a dialogue-based search for traces of German-German history in organisations, because we believe that “Not everything has been said yet!”, I have been reading. Among other things, about “Three East German women who get drunk and found an ideal state” and [...]

Children and young people are the only group in society that is systematically excluded from political participation. In their book Children - Minority without Protection, Aladin El-Mafaalani, Sebastian Kurtenbach and Klaus-Peter Strohmeier impressively show how this fact affects the reality of young people's lives. On this evening in February at the HDKDW, El-Mafaalani outlines a future in which [...]

Dear readers, It's been almost a month since the Bundestag elections and all the excitement there was in society during the election campaign, the progressive division of social groups, continues unabated, even though the designated new federal government under Merz negotiated an amendment to the Basic Law with the remaining government in the old Bundestag just last week. The question marks in my head about the [...]

In one of our SOCIUS salons “Healthy Sick People”, a participant reported that her son had died six years ago and spoke of grief as a chronic illness. As a bereavement counsellor and co-initiator of our SOCIUS salons on the topic of chronic illness and work, I had already thought about exactly this. Grief is one of the deepest and [...]

The TrauerTaskForce week of mourning took place at the end of October. In many different cultures, the dead are commemorated at this time of year. All Saints' Day, All Souls' Day, Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos), Sunday of the Dead, Eternity Sunday... The GriefTaskForce is a network of grief experts, supporters and friends who organised the week of mourning for the second time under the heading Eat.Cry.Repeat, [...].

We invited Žaklina Mamutovič and Nele Kontzi, two pioneers of the anti-bias approach in Germany, to the SOCIUS lab in June. The two have been working together in the anti-bias network for over 23 years. They educate, support, offer training and advice, and it is clear to see that they do this with conviction and passion. Back in 2015 [...]

Whether we are accompanying teams and organisations on the path to self-organisation or reflecting on our own process at Socius: Power is always a topic that needs to be discussed urgently on the one hand, but often also causes a lot of discomfort on the other. Power is usually held by „others“, whereas we prefer to call it „responsibility“. Power has something [...]

The New Quality of Work Initiative (INQA) is a federal programme for the promotion of small and medium-sized enterprises and non-profit organisations. With INQA Coaching, the successor programme to Unternehmenswert:Mensch has recently been launched, in which some SOCIUS team members were also accredited and have supported a total of around 80 funded organisational development processes over the past 5 years.

Creating this book was like founding a school - we needed patience, perseverance and staying power. We had to contend with a number of delays: promises that we needed didn't come as quickly as we wanted; the publisher announced that it would no longer be producing print media; our friend and BFAS board colleague Uwe Schröder [...]...

Construction noise was coming from the floor above us into the SOCIUS seminar room. Christian found this very annoying for the check-in round. And it immediately became clear how things would work here today: “Christian, that's not construction noise, that's the fart sound system we installed a few weeks ago in preparation for the lab! Be glad that [...]

We have eliminated nothing other than the blind, irrationally authoritarian behaviour that reduces productivity. With this quote, Ricardo Semler describes what motivated his mechanical engineering company SEMCO to break new ground over 50 years ago. Since then, the „technology of sociocracy“ has been further developed in numerous in-house experiments - including in this SOCIUS laboratory. Vivian Breucker [...]

Many years ago, I met Ines Boban, an expert on inclusion, at Matthias zur Bonsen's learning forum in Oberursel. At the time, she was working with her husband Prof Andreas Hinz in Halle. In May last year, I met them both on holiday on Brac, where we also spend our workations. We share an interest in [...]

Six were registered, five turned up. After a round of introductions, we began with a brief speculation: Why are there so few people here? Such an important and somehow inescapable topic: grief in the workplace. People die, there are separations, layoffs, crises - in work contexts, in private and in between, among colleagues, board members, managing directors, customers, friends. So why would [...]

On 13 October 2022, Nicola Kriesel, Lysan Escher and Andreas Knoth were at the „Every voice matters“ online conference of Sociocracy For All and talked about our own transformation process: How we are in an ongoing evolution from a heroic-led organisation with a big heart and a will to work as a team, through a post-heroic phase, into [...]

Diversity and discrimination sensitivity must go hand in hand with a power-critical discourse in organisations. The 15 participants in the Socius lab online on 16.9.21 largely agreed on this. At the same time, it became clear in the predominantly white educational group that the desire for a power-critical approach to diversity and discrimination-sensitive behaviour always starts with ourselves. Our lab guest [...]

A few years ago, the SOCIUS team already had experience with two grieving colleagues who had to let loved ones go within a very short space of time. The team of eight at the time reacted almost intuitively: empathetically, understandingly and patiently. The previous bereavements in the lives of the team members involved elderly parents. Here it was suddenly different, with siblings and [...]

At the beginning of 2017, I gave this written interview as a contribution to Christin Döhring's master's thesis on „Sociocracy - potentials and obstacles for modern organisations“. She sent me 15 questions. Now I have found it again and decided to publish it here because it might be of interest to others. I am pleased [...]

In our new category „SOCIA Outlooks“, we want to regularly focus our attention on the situations of women* in working life in NGOs, in the consulting business and in management positions. The interview series continues with Nicola Kriesel. In the next few weeks you can read the answers from Joana Ebbinghaus and Julia Hoffmann and then we will [...]

Admittedly, the method of collegial counselling, which can enrich both teams and so-called stranger labs, had not really died. Nevertheless, it has been a little quiet in recent years. In the SOCIUS team, we have always greatly appreciated collegial counselling sessions, sometimes in the super-quick format of fifteen minutes [...].

Sometimes good things take time and it takes us a while to share our thoughts and work with you. We have just come across two SOCIUS finds that have been waiting to be published for years. In 2016, Ralph Piotrowski gave a talk on „Professional proximity“ to employees of a charity organisation, which [...]

Every person who accompanies groups and teams, regardless of their size, has experienced it before: things don't run smoothly. The mood sinks. There is resistance. No progress is being made. Strong emotions become visible. You become nervous and insecure. What can you do when things get stuck in the process? When the mood gets rough and the [...]

The SOCIUS lab with Hannah Hummel in autumn 2019 was an intensive laboratory with six participants, which made the improvisations a very personal experience. Hannah Hummel is a social pedagogue and has been performing improvisational theatre for over 20 years. Her work and her passion are a good match, as her work with children and young people is also [...]

With 10 participants, our lab on 9 May was well attended. Marek Spitczok von Brisinski was there for the third time as lab leader for the experiments in this monthly room. This time it was about protection concepts for organisations in which there are structural power imbalances - in other words, almost all of them. Marek is a qualified sociologist, diversity trainer, mediator, trauma consultant and organisational developer. He is [...]